Community Post: The Power Prerogative

 

The Power Prerogative: Who Knows It, Who Loves It, and Who Prefers to Suffer Racism?

 

I believe people need to look, carefully and often, inside themselves. We need to go deeply into who we are, what we know, what we have been taught, and how we react to the world around us, if we ever hope to enjoy a place, even a small one, that is free of racism and racist hostility. For many people, this will not be easy. For many more, the mere suggestion of taking such responsibility is abhorrent.

So let’s begin with a new life, the life of a child.

Are children born racist? Are they inherently predisposed to seek the company of someone who has one particular factor in common with them–in this case, skin color (and by extension their primary culture), derived from their unique vessel of birth­­–and use that as a principal measure of their value and station in life?

Some people are going to say yes. To them, I have to ask, why?

The advocates for a global model of inherent nobility, who in turn embrace the notion of a racial hierarchy, are yet to provide me with a satisfactory answer. And I have listened, all the way through, to many. We all must walk the path of institutionalized racism because it is so deep, so seemingly indelible, that it would require a seriously twisted effort to deny its existence. Try as one might to “circumvent” it. I’ve seen people engineer such denial with one hand, and elaborately at that, while they seek to justify it with the other.

The issue, it appears, is simply too deep for them to remember ever having been free of its grip.

Who, do we suppose, is the ground zero source of the cognitive virus which expresses as racism? What good will come of our discovering the answer to the question?

I can’t help but notice that some people have the social antibodies that allow them to live free of the disfigurement which this virulent and aggressive condition has visited upon the population of the planet. The secondary damage, inflicted on scores of the innocent, is incalculable. Their cries echo, as if indefinitely.

We, as humans, have a lot of features in common, but we are also endlessly unique and varied. Why would a person want to narrow that wealth down to a systemic hierarchy, and then squeeze the life out of it, in a simple yet profoundly vicious play for control of all that they survey?

Why would they invent line after line of exquisite code; complex, convoluted, involuted, both subtle and brutal at the same time, in order to buttress a single assumption?

Life is how you see it, yet so much more. To see it this way­­–a racist way–­­to adopt this level of aggression, is a form of violence which claims the carrier as its first casualty. From there, all decisions which follow are consigned to shadow. The reasoning is corrupt.

Let yourself recall a time in life, a time before this cleaving. Some of us can, while others will find the work required to be unbearable. Still others have managed to make the passage, bear the burdens, suffer the scars, and survive the crucible.

I know whose company I prefer to keep. And I still can’t take my eyes off of the scars. The scarring I see being freshly inscribed on new life, each and every day.

All around the skin color wheel.

Yeah, we all have to go there–but to wildly varying degrees–pay the price, and do our best to live beyond the hobbling. We are, at once, both animal and divine. But the brutality comes down to the question of who has the right to own a given life. That question resides between two more. How is that life given, and in how many ways, and when is it “due” for another life to be deliberately diminished? Or ended. Irrevocably.

Racism Is, but it is Not Okay.

As an exercise, see how far you can make it into a day without experiencing a racist thought, be it active or reactive. Now understand that racism is part of an even bigger package of well­-crafted artifice, all designed to keep you–the you in all of us­­–in a “proper” place.

Now ask, whose place is it, this designated place? Yours, or theirs? Theirs, or ours?

It will always be a matter of how well you see what’s there to be seen, and how well you recover from the collision.

Tomorrow is the winter solstice­­–the shortest day of the year–­­in this hemisphere. As the sun then begins its six month return, and with it, the last of a (baker’s) dozen new moons which graced us in 2014, it is important to remember that both of these heavenly bodies shine for each of us, wherever we are, and wherever we come from, here on Earth.

As lovers, when separated, are sometimes known to do, I say to all beloved, the same sun shines on me, here, which shines on you. Whoever you are and wherever you stand, walk with love, survive the fear and discover, with each step, the true promise of freedom.

2014 will not come again. 2015 is the year in which many of us­­–many more, I hope–­­will commit their particular experience of renewal to a broadly beneficial aim.

It is a challenge to turn a troubled life around. A community? No less. But as many of my sisters and brothers already know—the hard way—you haven’t really lived until you do. Begin, always, with your very own.

Keep the peace. And be vigilant. The biggest enemy you’ll ever face is the one you carelessly let into your own way of seeing. Dispatch it here, at the place where it roots in you, and the true nature of the aggressors, as well as their strategies, become ever more apparent. As we persevere in this resolve, our ability to repel every form of abuse will improve, and markedly.

Best wishes to all of us­­–the wounded and the weary, the indomitable and the intrepid–not only for the year ahead in 2015, but for that which we redeem of the year, the lives, and the hard lessons which preceded it.

 

espalier

 

 

 

About Griff 321 Articles
Lee "Griff" Dorry - Founder, watchdog, and public advocate. ♫ They've got strings, but you can see, there are no strings on me. ♫

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